Flash in the Pan

I was actually shocked when I read this story in Vanity Fair about how Monsanto tries to bully and threaten farmers throughout this country. The cause of this behavior is the company's efforts in genetically modified (GM) foods - specifically, seeds designed to resist Monsanto's Roundup herbicide. The idea is to make it easy for farmers to spend money on the weed killer and know that the crops will survive it. Those who use the seeds have to sign a licensing agreement, which includes provisions that prohibit them from saving any of the resulting seed to replant. In other words, Monsanto doesn't want farmers to be able to save any money by using the ages-old practice of saving part of a crop to provide seed for the next year. Forget about whether the farmers really get that they're not allowed to do business as usual. (When was the last time you fully read a loan agreement, let along an intellectual property license?)

The article opens with a story about someone going into someone's general store and threatening the owner that there was proof he had used the GM seeds in violation of the patent, and that if he didn't settle with Monsanto, they'd go after him:

Scenes like this are playing out in many parts of rural America these days as Monsanto goes after farmers, farmers’ co-ops, seed dealers—anyone it suspects may have infringed its patents of genetically modified seeds. As interviews and reams of court documents reveal, Monsanto relies on a shadowy army of private investigators and agents in the American heartland to strike fear into farm country. They fan out into fields and farm towns, where they secretly videotape and photograph farmers, store owners, and co-ops; infiltrate community meetings; and gather information from informants about farming activities. Farmers say that some Monsanto agents pretend to be surveyors. Others confront farmers on their land and try to pressure them to sign papers giving Monsanto access to their private records. Farmers call them the “seed police” and use words such as “Gestapo” and “Mafia” to describe their tactics.

The company is also busy in acquisitions, clearly trying to own the seed market and, as a result, as much of the world's food supply as it can. Secret investigations? Threats? Economic hardball? Is this the kind of organization you'd trust to control your food? This article is a must read for anyone concerned about what goes onto their plates.

Labels: farming, food, Monsanto

The food crisis is getting big enough that even the major media are starting to cover it. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO), rising prices (48 percent increase since early 2007), particularly for staple grains like rice, are putting 37 countries on the brink of a food crisis. There have been actual food uprisings (or the fear of them) in Bangladesh, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Mauritania, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand.

Driving the rising prices are the conversion of land from producing food to biofuel materials, which are still food crops, but taken out of the global food chain. The EU's subsidized crops, offered at a fraction of their production price, have undercut agriculture in Africa. Toss in low food reserves, and you see exacerbated prices that then become fodder for financial speculators. Food aid money isn't going as far as it needs to, and the UN World Food Program says that it needs $500 million in additional aid by May 1. Even so, 100 million people may find themselves pushed even deeper into poverty because of the unavoidable cost of eating.

Labels: food, grains, poverty, prices, rice, UN

Those who've been watching the escalating cost of food had better ready themselves again: international rice prices have jumped 30 percent, according to the Financial Times. Egypt put into place a ban forbidding exporting rice. It's a big producer of the grain, but is keeping its production at home to help keep lower prices for its own consumers - following a trend:

The Egyptian export ban formalises a previously poorly enforced curb and follows similar restrictions imposed by Vietnam and India, the world’s second- and third-largest exporters. Cambodia, a small seller, also on Thursday announced an export ban.

These foreign sales restrictions have removed about a third of the rice traded in the international market.

That will only exaccerbate a growing problem of food shortages worldwide and, sadly, riots as a result. Expect US producers to look for higher prices along with the rest of the market.

Labels: food, grains, prices, rice

Remember the story about beef from crippled cows being recalled? Apparently the list of institutions and companies that received the meat has recently been expanded and now includes weight loss firm Jenny Craig:

The state said Jenny Craig Salisbury steak and meatloaf meals were made with beef recalled from Westland/Hallmark. Lisa Talamini, a Jenny Craig program executive, said the company has taken swift action to notify its customers.

“We have asked our distribution centers and retail channels to locate and destroy all impacted products,” Talamini said in a statement. “As part of our commitment to quality and client service, we are making every effort to inform those clients who are in receipt of impacted product.”

However, a legal PR person and activist that I know in California was interviewed - turns out she had recently bought some of the products - and the "effort" to inform people was to put a small sign on the counter in the Jenny Craig locations. This Feb. 27 post on the Jenny Craig site suggests that the company knew about this as of then. So why hasn't the company done anything other than post some small signs? "Every effort" would suggest a whole lot more ... effort.

Labels: food, product, recall, warning

I've tried 'em, and they taste and act like regular eggs. But the people at Eggland's Best have a patented feed mix - which they license to producers around the country (generally you're getting a local egg with the Eggland's branding) - that supposedly improves nutrition. I have no way of verifying these claims independently, as the Flash in the Pan lab decided that when the first day of spring brings more snow and sub-freezing weather, it's time to move south. However, here are some of the improvements over normal eggs that the company claims: 19 percent less cholesterol, 25 percent less saturated fat and 10 percent less overall fat, almost three times the omega 3 fatty acids (research supports that they may help reduce risk of coronary heart disease), five times the vitamin E, and 25 percent more lutein (good for the eyes). To be fair, if you aren't eating egg all the time, then this isn't going to be a reliable source of nutrition. But when you are using eggs, it's nice to know.

We still go for: 1) eggs from our chickens (when they feel like paying off the massive debt in chicken feed they now owe), 2) organic store-bought, and 3) vegetarian-fed free range (though, to be truthful, chickens have eating habits that you probably don't want to know if you're ever to use an egg again in your life). But the Eggland's Best seems like a reasonable choice.

Labels: food, ingredients, opinion, review

I recently reviewed Hormel Compleats - a line of one-dish meals that store on the shelf without refrigeration. The company's PR representatives just emailed in response to my comments on the sodium content:

I did want to clarify your statement on sodium content. The USDA recommends that healthy Americans get 2,300 milligrams per day. (USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2005, Chapter 8 “Sodium and Potassium - http://www.health.gov/dietaryguidelines/dga2005/document/html/chapter8.htm) At 600 milligrams or less, Hormel Compleats products provide roughly a quarter or less of the sodium recommendation per day. The sodium content in Hormel Compleats is equal to or less than other single serving shelf-stable offerings in the market today.

I think the PR firm meant that it wanted to challenge my statement, as I don't see how it would be in the position to clarify what I had said. In any case, the product may hover around the same sodium content as other shelf-stable offerings, but the company's analysis is off and even misleading. First, the USDA reference cited does not recommend that people get 2,300 mg of sodium, but less than 2,300 mg of sodium, which is a significantly different statement. If you are middle-aged or older, black, or have hypertension, the top number is 1,500 mg. But that's not the USDA's only statement on sodium.

Instead, let's consider this from the second chapter, Adequate Nutrients Within Calorie Needs, of the same USDA 2005 dietary guidelines. I'd argue that looking at nutritional needs would be closer to the concept of a recommended minimum amount, and that the 2,000 Kcal nutrition levels are near an adult average, given gender and activity levels, which can widely swing the recommendations. That 2,000 Kcal number is the general baseline used for nutritional comparisons on food levels. For that level of caloric intake, the recommended sodium number is 1,779 mg. And here’s an interesting paragraph from the same chapter the company quoted:

Common sources of sodium found in the food supply are provided in figure 4. On average, the natural salt content of food accounts for only about 10 percent of total intake, while discretionary salt use (i.e., salt added at the table or while cooking) provides another 5 to 10 percent of total intake. Approximately 75 percent is derived from salt added by manufacturers.

In other words, packaged foods - shelf-stable or not - put the largest amount of sodium per serving into our diets. On the whole, I think that my analysis is probably more realistic in terms of viewing a food as "healthy" or not, and certainly closer to what a health professional would likely say than taking the number Hormel does and trying to interpret it as a recommended amount that people should have, rather than a maximum, with the understanding that, for salt, less is certainly more.

Labels: food, nutrition, PR, product, review

The FDA, in a display of infinitesimal wisdom, has decided that using cloned animals for meat and milk is fine, not a problem, don't worry about a thing. And, of course, they speak after exhaustive testing over a sufficiently long period of time to follow any short- or long-term effects. As the Washington Post puts it:

A long-awaited final report from the Food and Drug Administration concludes that foods from healthy cloned animals and their offspring are as safe as those from ordinary animals, effectively removing the last U.S. regulatory barrier to the marketing of meat and milk from cloned cattle, pigs and goats.

The nearly thousand-page government report acknowledges ethical, moral, and religious issues, but says that it is not allowed to consider those.

How about this: until you can do widespread tests and see what the results are of people ingesting clones, you simply cannot state that there is no problem. When issues occur in any type of health study, they can occur so infrequently that it takes large numbers to notice them. I'm not arguing that meat and milk from cloned animals is going to have a problem. I can't know that and wouldn't want to pretend that I did. However, I know enough not to make dangerous assumptions of safety without equally valid information.

To create its final risk assessment, the FDA gathered data on nearly all of the more than 600 U.S. farm-animal clones produced and hundreds of their offspring, as well as many from overseas. But it faced challenges in the process.

Those animals were made by scientists scattered among various universities and companies using different methods that in many cases were difficult to compare.

Moreover, many of those animals were not just clones but also had genes added to them for projects unrelated to food production.

But permission comes down anyway. It's not as though the world is in danger of starvation through lack of livestock. What the clones are supposed to be is breeding stock, to get only the results companies think they want. But has anyone studied the potential issues of reducing biodiversity? Silly me, of course not - it's unimportant, because, hell, we're already creating genetically modified crops that are displacing traditional varieties. And those are fine, because government has already ruled that they are. So we see arguments for permitting a practice being predicated on permitting the practice, a logical merry-go-round. And who cares whether large markets for US agriculture won't buy genetically modified crops and might well refuse to buy meat and milk from animals bred from clones?

There won't be any requirement to label meat from cloned animals as such, though the FDA may allow labeling that food comes from non-cloned animals. But how far does the mark of Clone go back? Do an animal's immediate parents cause concern? Next generation back? How would anyone even track this? But the approach the FDA has taken can't take this into consideration:

In the end, facing the reality that epigenetics have never been a factor in assessing the wholesomeness of food, agency scientists decided to use the same simple but effective standard used by farmers since the dawn of agriculture: If a farm animal appears in all respects to be healthy, then presume that food from that animal is safe to eat.

...

Scientists also looked at nutrient levels in meat and milk from a few dozen cattle and pig clones and hundreds of their progeny, and compared them with values from conventional animals. They measured vitamins A, C, B1, B2, B6 and B12 as well as niacin, pantothenic acid, calcium, iron, phosphorous, zinc, 12 kinds of fatty acids, cholesterol, fat, protein, amino acids and carbohydrates including lactose.

What insanity. "Looks fine to me" becomes the food standard, at a time when our food production has become contaminated multiple times from agents and issues we already understand. Just when I think the shortsightedness of government couldn't get any worse, I find new depths of disgust with groups that want to direct nature and that don't want to take a responsible path. Proving a negative - lack of harm - is certainly a difficult, and perhaps ultimately impossible, task. But there's the old saying that the difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer. When you weight financial and corporate convenience with the health of billions, take a little longer.

Labels: clones, FDA, food, study

When I was reviewing Anne Willan's new book, I came across some interesting linguistic tidbits that I covered in my En Words blog, but thought that people interested in food might also find them amusing.

Labels: food, language

I had received an email from the PR people for Appetizerstogo.com asking if I wanted to try some of their products. My wife and I have learned in the past how helpful good quality frozen appetizers can be when hosting a large party - it's just one more thing that you don't have to do. (Though, if you have the time, you can still make things ahead and freeze them yourself.) So I said, sure, send a sampling. And they did - of 100 cocktail-sized kosher franks wrapped in puff pastry.

So the variety in this case was lacking, and I'm not the biggest fan of wrapped wieners, but these were superior and actually worth the eating. In fact, a handful can make a good lunch, when you think you have nothing else on hand. Not only did the franks have that all beef taste, but the puff pastry actually puffed. (Though don't expect a buttery flavor, as mixing dairy and meat doesn't pass kosher muster, and these are supposed to be kosher.)

Now for the downside: "your price" is almost $80, or close to 80 cents each. Add another $14 for shipping (express with dry ice), according to their order form, and you're at 94 cents a piece. There does seem to be a special, where you can order three or more boxes and the shipping is free. I can't vouch for the other appetizers (hey, I'm willing to test them - honest), but if the quality is close at all, then this site becomes a great resource for your next large party.\

And if you'd like a good dipping sauce, we found that Pirates Blend Caribbean Condiment from Half Moon Bay Trading Company was a great match, even though that company suggests it for seafood, poultry, pork, and a few other things, but doesn't mention beef. Made with ginger, cumin, mustard, garlic, celery, and cayenne, it's spicy but not really hot.

Labels: appetizers, food, opinion, ready-made, review

A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:

• Rice Not Nice Venice is banning throwing rice at newly weds because of the "hordes of pigeons" who follow the ceremonies. What's really bad is when they crash the reception, get drunk, and put lampshades on their heads. (Reuters)


• Marmalade Mess The creator of Paddington Bear took heat when the character started snacking not on his accustomed marmalade, but on Marmite sandwiches in an advertisement. Marmite is a popular British food spread made of beer brewing byproducts. Maybe Paddington could just hoist a pint, instead. (Ananova)


• Bus Brunch The French city of Lille is running buses on biodiesel produced from food scraps, weeds, flowers, and grass clippings at a new recycling plant. From one form of gas to another. (AFP)


• Burrito Eating Champ A New York day trader ate 10 3/4 burritos in 12 minutes to win what was billed as the world burrito eating championship. The winner, "Eater X," is also an aspiring pizza chef. Guess that day trading is working out well, then. (AP)


• Raparian Feast In Acton, England, 500 people dove into a swimming pool to set the record for the world's largest formal underwater dinner party. Largest formal? You mean there's another subcategory? (Daily Telegraph)

Labels: burritos, drink, eating, food, news, odd, pool, record, speed eating, weird

I received an email from a wine writer and sommelier, Natalie MacLean, about her web site. (She did begin this email with, "I enjoy following your stories," a nice bit of flattery, though I suspect goes out to any journalist receiving the email.)

I know of her but don't know her personally, so I went over to her site to see what was going on. Among the other aspects of her site is a wine and food matcher (listed as Food & Wine in the site's menu). You pick either the wine or food, and you get matches. It's a multi-step process, and you're not restricted to the obvious. For example, I first choose snacks, and then picked Oreos. Wine with Oreos? Who's have thought it? Though I remember doing theater in college and the technical crews would often have the cookies with orange juice, so a combination of acid and sweet did work. Ms. MacLean's recommendations? Either Banyuls (a fortified aperitif or dessert wine from the Pyrenees - thanks Wikipedia) or a vintage port. You can then enter the wine into a search engine and get her recent reviews. I did so for Banyuls and found her "Good Value Wines February 2007."

Next, I started over with sparkling wine, picked asti spumante, and got the following recommendations:

• Chocolate Mousse (Light)



• Christmas Pudding



• Fruit Salad



• Lemon Souffle



• Mille Feuilles



• Pavlova

For turkey pot pie? Chianti or Sauvignon Blanc. This isn't going to cover every conceivable food you could think of, but it has a lot of useful pairings for every day eating, and any time you can get a wine pairing for a favorite cookie, it's at least worth a smile. Want to know what goes with Fig Newtons? She says she'll respond to emails from the site.

Labels: food, Natalie MacLean, pairings, web site, wine

As the New York Times reports, China is far from being the single source of contaminated food, which includes:

• black pepper, coriander powder, and shrimp with salmonella from India


• crabmeat, lollipops, and dried chili peppers from Mexico so dirty that it wasn't edible


• mislabeled candy from Denmark (impounded 520 times last year)


• traces of illegal pesticides on produce from the Dominican Republic

If this has been so prevelant - and apparently making China sometimes look like a piker, why is the media just getting around to reporting this now?

Labels: China, contamination, Denmark, Dominical Republic, food, Mexico

When Menus Become Intellectual Property

The New York Times had an interesting article yesterday about chef Rebecca Charles suing her former sous-chef, Ed McFarland, claiming that his restaurant Ed's Lobster Bar copied "each and every element" of her establishment, Pearl Oyster Bar, from the decor to the Caesar salad recipe.The article goes on to say how a growing number of chefs are resorting to intellectual property protections - such as patents, trademarks, copyright, and trade secrets - to keep competitors from lifting their concepts. I found the following paragraph particularly intriguing:

She [Rebecca Charles] was, she asserts, the first chef in New York who took lobster rolls, fried clams and other sturdy utility players of New England seafood cookery and lifted them to all-star status on her menu. Since opening Pearl Oyster Bar in the West Village 10 years ago, she has ruefully watched the arrival of a string of restaurants she considers “knockoffs” of her own.

Ah, but where does inspiration leave off and copying start? The first chef in New York to treat New England seafood as haute cuisine? Maybe, but since when does originality stop at state borders?

A few years ago I interviewed Jasper White for Fortune Small Business because he had actually patented a way of cooking lobsters quickly in large batches. It was a veritable assembly line. "The reason I patented it is because this is a real copy cat business," he said, adding that other restaurateurs had lifted his ideas time and again. "Their idea of an influence is to copy it, put a new name on it, do it in another city, and call it a day."

White has been doing the upscale treatment of New England food - including seafood - since at least his time at the restaurant in the Bostonian Hotel back in the 1980s. So is Charles really innovative? And taking the ambiance of a seafood shack? They've been around for decades - as have other places

She acknowledged that Pearl was itself inspired by another narrow, unassuming place, Swan Oyster Depot in San Francisco. But she said she had spent many months making hundreds of small decisions about her restaurant’s look, feel and menu.

Those decisions made the place her own, she said, and were colored by her history. The paint scheme, for instance, was meant to evoke the seascape along the Maine coast where she spent summers as a girl.

Hundreds of small decisions? That's nice, but there was that original concept she saw - and adapted. The paint scheme evocative of summers in Maine? She may see that as a personal statement, but so could hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of others who have spent enough time in Maine. The Caesar salad? Got the recipe from her mother who got it from an LA restaurant years ago, except now she calls it a trade secret. But whose? Coddled eggs as a basis for the dressing? I remember hearing that concept probably a dozen years ago on a cooking show where the chefs said that it was a way to prevent problems with salmonella from raw eggs.

I understand the desire to protect intellectual property. I do that myself, as my living is based on IP. But you need to know when you've really done something different and when you owe too much to everyone who has gone before. When you want to keep a tight hold on what you've done and keep anyone else from using it as a springboard, you argue that you should not have the benefit of anyone else's experience, either.

The article mentions a Chicago chef who patented a way of printing images on edible paper. That's certainly different. An upscale clam shack? I think not - at least not by someone who didn't invent the idea in the first place.

Labels: Ed McFarland, food, IP, Jasper White, patent, Rebecca Charles, restaurant

Domestic diva and sharp businesswoman Martha Stewart is going to deliver "good things" to the masses by lending her name to Costco. The warehouse retailer will put her image on fresh and frozen foods. As the New York Times article notes, the company had a first quarter loss evne larger than the same time last year. Revenues went up, but so did spending to launch Blueprint and to renovate the company web site. What's coming from Martha's kitchen? No one is saying, yet, but I'm betting that it comes with a built in clock and that it nags you if you are late to put it on the stove.

Labels: Costco, food, groceries, Martha Stewart

According to a survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 83% of 1,662 doctors surveyed said that they accept food and drink from drug companies, and almost 4 out of 5 took free drug samples. Wonder if the freebie pharmaceuticals are obesity drugs?

Labels: doctors, drink, food, medicine, samples

According to a Washington Post story, the Food and Drug Administration actually knew about the problems at a peanut butter plant and spinach farms that led to some deaths and many illnesses.

Overwhelmed by huge growth in the number of food processors and imports, however, the agency took only limited steps to address the problems and relied on producers to police themselves, according to agency documents.

Apparently FDA officials are saying that there was nothing they could have done. Well, other than sit on their backsides, but it appears that they already did that.

The outbreaks point to a need to change the way the agency does business, said Robert E. Brackett, director of the FDA's food-safety arm, which is responsible for safeguarding 80 percent of the nation's food supply.

"We have 60,000 to 80,000 facilities that we're responsible for in any given year," Brackett said. Explosive growth in the number of processors and the amount of imported foods means that manufacturers "have to build safety into their products rather than us chasing after them," Brackett said. "We have to get out of the 1950s paradigm."

Now just what paradigm is that? That someone has to make sure that food manufacturers do adequate jobs in keeping such things from happening? And all this time I thought that's what the agency was supposed to do.

Labels: FDA, food, food safety

We've been fans of Penzey's Spices for a long time. But apparently my wife realized that they also had stores, one of which is in the food marketplace in Grand Central Station. It's not huge, real estate there being expensive, but they still have a solid selection and samples to smell. We bought a number of things, including a double-strength Madagascar vanilla with an aroma that should do wonders for baking. (And at $14 for 4 ounces, it had better...)

Labels: food, Grand Central Station, Madagascar, New York, Penzey's, spices, vanilla